Reinventing Customization
New Technologies, New Markets, and New Strategies
Building on the market lens framework described in the companion report, Beyond Consumer Segmentation: New Technologies, New Market Lenses, this report, Reinventing Customization: New Technologies, New Markets, and New Strategies, demonstrates how customization is likely to emerge in the future—not necessarily as personalized to specific individuals’ desires, but to small groups based on product use, context, social networks, swarms, and other characteristics.
The market lens framework depicts a range of different “lenses” that companies will use over the next ten years to understand their consumer markets. Some of these lenses will be similar to the ones companies use now—they may seek to segment their markets into large groups (the Segments Lens), track the preferences of individual customers (the Individual Lens), or understand customers’ actual patterns of product or service use (the Experience Lens). Other lenses will emerge in tandem with new technologies, allowing companies to remotely sense the identity, location, or even mood of consumers (the Context Lens), understand how purchasing and usage are affected by consumers’ networks of friends and family (the Social Networks Lens), or capitalize upon emergent patterns in the behavior of large crowds of consumers (the Swarms Lens). Here, we look at customization through these lenses, and consider the implications and strategies for companies who wish to move into this space. As a special epilogue, we look at customization challenges in developing markets.
Publication Date
July 2003